Output details

Locating London's Past

www.locatinglondon.org

Locating London's Past does something new - it allows both historical texts and structured data to be mapped on to the administrative geographies of eighteenth-century London; and does so in a way that can be used online by anyone. It essentially brings the methodologies of Geographical Information Systems to a wider audience, and lays the foundations for new forms of text mining, that incorporates a geographical component, including the mapping of plain language sources onto a historical landscape. The site maps 4.9 million place names; and is built on top of a layer of 30,000 polygons describing the boundaries of every street, ally parish and administrative district in London.

The project was a collaboration between Tim Hitchcock, Robert Shoemaker (Sheffield) and Matthew Davies (IHR); with technical support provided by the Museum of London Archaeological Service, and the Humanities Research Institute. With Shoemaker and Davies, Hitchcock was responsible for the overall management of the project, the choice of historical materials, the processing of the datasets included, and the design of the website and its functionality. Hitchcock also researched and developed the comprehensive set of population figures used to generate population density data for the site, and wrote the background pages 'Estimating London's Population'.

The site both reflects the detailed understanding of the archives of London built up by Hitchcock, Shoemaker and Davies over decades of research; and the technical understanding of what it is possible to do with digital text, and GIS, developed through the creation of the London Lives and Old Bailey Online projects.